美国文学复习资料

1.Puritanism清教主义1)predestination:2)original sin and total depravity3)limited atonement4)theocracy

2.清教主义对美国文学的影响1)Its optimism and a group of good qualities—hard work, thrift, piety has exerted a great influence on american literature.2)It led to an everlasting myth, all american literature was based on the myth of Garden of Eden3)Puritan’s metaphisical mode of perception led to a literary symbolism which is distinctly American

3.对自传的评价1)The Autobiography is, first of all, a Puritan document. It is a record of self-examination and self-improvement. 2)The Autobiography is also an eloquent elucidation of the fact that Benjamin Franklin was spokesman for the new order of 18th century enlightenment, and that he represented in America all its ideas, that man is basically good and free, by nature endowed by God with certain inalienable rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

4.分析野生金银花The wild honeysuckle1)In the poem the poet expresses his keen awareness of the loveliness and transience of nature .he not only meditated on mortality but also celebrated nature.It implies that life and death are inevitable law of nature.2)the poem showed strong feelings for the natural beauty,which was the characteristic of ro mantic poets. 3)The poem was written in six-line iambic tetrameter stanzas rhymed on ababcc pattern

5.浪漫主义时期的特点Characteristics1)For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense. 2)They stressed the close relationship between man and nature. 3)They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against authority.

4)They affirmed the inner life of the self, ad wanted each person to be free to develop and express his own inner thoughts.5)They cherished strong interest in the past.6)They were attracted by the wild, the irregular, the indefinite, the remote, the mysterious and the strange.

6.浪漫主义的主要特点Main Features1)Difference from their European counterparts:American romantics tended to moralize, rather than to entertain. 2)An entirely new experience:the exotic landscape, the frontier life, the westward expansion, the myth of a New Garden of Eden in America, and the Puritan heritage, which produced a feeling of …newness‟.

7.对瑞普凡作品的评价Rip Van Winkle1)so famous, a part of the American cultural tradition2)marks a distinct step in the development of the short-story 3)from a German source---changed the setting and added conflicts of his own to make it American

8.分析瑞普凡温克尔1)Superficially, the conflict between husband and wife was presented in the story. In fact, the writer tries to express his idea: the conflict between different ideas of value.

2)R ip Van Winkle is representative of all romantic persons.3)It focuses on rip‟s confused state of mind when waking from his twenty year‟s sleeping. The confusion is the true feflection of the psychological difficuties of the Americans in understanging their own recent national history4) It reveals irving‟s own creative process and the literary production in America at that time

9.分析睡谷传说中心思想The theme of “sleepy hollow1)It is an amusing tale about the conflict between Icabod and Brom. Icabod is a bookworm and has the supposed traits such as frailty and cowardice. Brom is unthinking and rough but not without his cleverness and mischief. The contrast seems to point toward a conflict between pretentious intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. Neither wins the heart of the readers, but brom wins the girl.2)The writer tries to reveal the superiority of the serene village over the noisy modern citied. He described the bumper harvest in lively and light words. The schoolmaster was described vividly. With his shrewdness, self-assertiveness and cowardice, he is described as an interloper, a destructive force.